media manipulation and harassment - the cover up of child abuse crimes

"The argument between the field of child sexual abuse and the backlash against
survivors is not an academic debate between two well meaning groups equally
invested in ascertaining truth. It is not an academic debate at all; it is a
political fight." P. 121 "What wins political fights is organization and stamina
and a refusal to be intimidated." P. 122 - Anna Salter (Confessions of a Whistle-
Blower: Lessons Learned)

harassment:

Calof, D.L. (1998). Notes from a practice under siege: Harassment, defamation,
and intimidation in the name of science, Ethics and Behavior, 8(2) pp. 161-187.
Abstract: I have practiced psychotherapy, family therapy, and hypnotherapy for
over 25 years without a single board complaint or law suit by a client. For over
three years, however, a group of proponents of the false memory syndrome (FMS)
hypothesis, including members, officials, and supporters of the False Memory
Syndrome Foundation, Inc., have waged a multi-modal campaign of harassment and
defamation directed against me, my clinical clients, my staff, my family, and
others connected to me. I have neither treated these harassers or their families,
nor had any professional or personal dealings with any of them; I am not related
in any way to the disclosures of memories of sexual abuse in these families.
Nonetheless, this group disrupts my professional and personal life and threatens
to drive me out of business. In this article, I describe practicing psychotherapy
under a state of siege and places the campaign against me in the context of a much
broader effort in the FMS movement to denigrate, defame, and harass clinicians,
lecturers, writers, and researchers identified with the abuse and trauma treatment
communities. http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/notes-from-a-practice-
under-siege/

Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Learned Author: Anna C. Salter DOI:

10.1207/s15327019eb0802_2 Published in: Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2
June 1998 , pages 115 - 124 Abstract - In 1988 I began a report on the accuracy
of expert testimony in child sexual abuse cases utilizing Ralph Underwager and
Hollida Wakefield as a case study (Wakefield & Underwager, 1988). In response,
Underwager and Wakefield began a campaign of harassment and intimidation, which
included multiple lawsuits; an ethics charge; phony (and secretly taped) phone
calls; and ad hominem attacks, including one that I was laundering federal grant
monies. The harassment and intimidation failed as the author refused demands to
retract. In addition, the lawsuits and ethics charges were dismissed. Lessons
learned from the experience are discussed.
http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/confessions-of-a-whistle-blower-lessons-
learned/

http://ritualabuse.us/research/memory-fms/recovered-memory-data/

Media Manipulation:

U-Turn on Memory Lane by Mike Stanton - Columbia Journalism Review - July/August

1997

The FMSF builds much of its case against recovered memory by attacking a generally
discredited Freudian concept of repression that proponents of recovered memory
don't buy, either. In so doing, the foundation ignores the fifty-year-old
literature on traumatic, or psychogenic amnesia, which is an accepted diagnosis by
the American Psychiatric Association. In his 1996 book "Searching for Memory," the
Harvard psychologist and brain researcher Daniel L. Schachter — who believes that
both true and false memories exist — says there is no conclusive scientific
evidence that false memories can be created….The foundation and its backers
"remind me of a high school debate team," says the Stanford psychiatrist David
Spiegel, an authority on traumatic amnesia. "They go to the library, surgically
extract the information convenient to them and throw out the rest."….Many
therapists, like their patients, hesitate to speak out.Recently, though, they have
begun to make a more concerted effort to mobilize a response. One of the most
outspoken critics of the false-memory movement is a Seattle therapist, David
Calof, editor until last year of Treating Abuse Today, a newsletter for
therapists. He has identified what he calls the movement's political agenda —
lobbying for more restrictive laws governing therapy and promoting the harassment
of therapists through lawsuits and even picketing of their offices and homes.
Calof himself has been the target of picketing so fierce that he has been in and
out of Seattle courtrooms over the last two years, obtaining restraining orders.
He was spending so much time and money fighting the FMSF supporters' campaign
against him, he says, that he was forced to stop publishing the newsletter last
year. He recently donated the publication to a victims' rights group in
Pennsylvania, which has resurrected it as Trauma. The new publisher says that
views part of its mission as reporting on FMSF, since the mainstream media don't.

Among journalists, perhaps the most relentless critic of the foundation is Michele
Landsberg, a Toronto Star columnist. In 1993, she says, an Ontario couple,
claiming to have been falsely accused, contacted her and asked her to write about
their case. Unconvinced, she declined, and eventually started writing instead
about the foundation.She attacked its scientific claims and criticized the
sensational media coverage. She described how a foundation scientific adviser,
Harold Merskey, had testified that a woman accusing a doctor of sexual abuse in a
civil case might in fact have been suffering from false memory syndrome. But the
accused doctor himself had previously confessed to criminal charges of abusing
her. Landsberg also challenged the credentials of other foundation advisers. She
noted that one founding adviser, Ralph Underwager, was forced to resign from the
foundation's board after he and his wife, Hollida Wakefield, who remains an
adviser, gave an interview to a Dutch pedophilia magazine in which he was quoted
as describing pedophilia as"an acceptable expression of God's will for love."
Landsberg also wrote that another adviser, James Randi, a magician known as "The
Amazing Randi," had been involved in a lawsuit in which his opponent introduced a
tape of sexually explicit telephone conversations Randi had with teenage boys.
(Randi has claimed at various times, she said, that the tape was a hoax and that
the police asked him to make it.) "Why haven't reporters investigated the False
Memory Syndrome Foundation?" she asks. "It's legitimate to examine their
backgrounds –here are people who really do have powerful motivation to deny the
truth." http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/97/4/memory.asp

Battle Tactics of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation - Noel Packard - New School
for Social Research, N.Y. History Matters Conference April 23-24, 2004 Censorship
is also a tactic that FMS Foundation adherents use to silence voices they don't
agree with. Katy Butler, published a critical review of Ofshe's and Watter's book,
Making Monsters (1994) in the Los Angeles Times. Later the newspaper's book review
editor received a vague threat of a lawsuit from Ofshe's representative (K. Butler
personal communication with Lynn Crook January 28, 2000). Later Butler was asked
to write a story for Newsweek examining the uncritical acceptance of Foundation
claims and to provide documented cases of recovered memory and traumatic amnesia.
Upon learning of this assignment Foundation Advisory Board members Richard Ofshe
and Fredrick Crews, as well as Peter and Pamela Freyd, wrote strongly worded
letters of complaint to Newsweek which effectively canceled Butler's assignment
(Stanton 1997). Although these censorship activities were reported in Mike
Stanton's article "U-Turn on Memory Lane" (1997) Nevertheless, Newsweek editors
confirmed that the FMS Foundation letters helped kill Butler's article. Butler
said at a national conference of investigative reporters and editors in Rhode
Island in 1996: "I've worked hard very hard to tell both sides of the story.
What's interesting to me about all of this that telling both sides has started to
seem like a risky act." (Stanton 1997: 49)….In 1994 the editor of the Journal of
Psychohistory Lloyd DeMause wrote to many professional subscribers to inform them
that he feared a lawsuit by the FMS Foundation for publishing a special issue of
his journal on cult abuse. Dr. Jean Goodwin a psychiatrist at University of Texas
Medical Branch responded with a letter that conveys the overall feeling among the
mental health community in the early 1990s. Goodwin: From a Psychohistorical
viewpoint it is fascinating to watch this organization systematically limit
freedom of speech in this area. Their suits of publishers have driven many books
out of print. Board members have prevented publication of many articles. As far as
I know you are the first journal editor they have targeted. The slander suit
stopped the audio-tapping of many presentations in this area. The licensing
attacks and the malpractice suits threaten freedom of speech in the psychotherapy
consulting room, which is where it is supposed to be most free. Silence still is
the priority for the perpetrator (Goodwin 1994) Goodwin's letter captures the
effect that Foundations' tactics had on the therapy community in the early 1990s.
Today the overall effect of the Foundation's court cases and tactics is more
muted. One newly graduated MFT told me that as far as she knows the Foundation has
had no impact on the practices of MFTs at all. A social worker who teaches a
certification class on mandated reporting includes the Foundation topic in her
lectures, saying that the Foundation "made us clean up our act." I've also heard a
seasoned MFT who teaches a class titled, "Counseling as a Career Option" lament
that practicing psychotherapy is becoming a profession only for the rich (both as
practitioners and clients). Perhaps this is due to recent constrictions and costs
associated with lawsuits, training programs, licensing and insurance policies? It
appears that the Foundations' efforts to drive non-cognitive therapy beyond the
grasp of un-wealthy clients are having some success. Kondora's and Beckett's
studies indicate that the Foundation has been successful in many of its efforts to
manage public perception of child abuse victims, therapists and the people accused
of child abuse. Kondora and Beckett show that not only has public perception of
victimized children become skeptical, but in fact, the press often goes beyond the
Victorian custom of neutrality on all fronts of the issue, to out-right sympathy
for accused molesters. What began in the 1960s and 1970s as a child welfare
movement has arrived today as an accused sex-offender welfare movement (Goldsmith
2003); and right in time for an era when people are having more babies, less birth
control and have easier ways to create home based child pornography than ever
before....The Foundation's efforts in and out of the court room have provided
reasons for health insurance companies to reduce insurance payments for mental
health care and have tied those payments generally to mental health diagnoses.
Training programs for clinical therapists have become more like the clinical
training programs of the cold-war years, more science oriented, more stringent,
more biologically and drug oriented, and less theory and talked based. Many of the
support groups, networks, newsletters, journals, and even significant names in the
child welfare movement of the 1980's and 1990's have faded, vanished or been
displaced by on-line and other services of the FMS Foundation. Kondora, Lori L.
1997. A Textual Analysis of the Construction of the False Memory Syndrome:
Representations in Popular Magazines; 1990-1995. Ph.D. diss. University of
Wisconsin, Madison. - Beckett, Katherine. 1996. Culture and the Politics of
Signification: The Case of Child Sexual Abuse. SOCIAL PROBLEMS, Vol. 43, No. 1,
February: 57-76.
http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/historymatters/papers/NoelPackard.pdf